from the greed-did-this dept
It’s time as soon as once more to play: “issues that in all probability wouldn’t occur if the U.S. wasn’t too corrupt to cross a good internet-era privateness regulation.”
Final week, The Washington Submit revealed {that a} group of conservative Colorado Catholics spent thousands and thousands of {dollars} to buy person location information to single out monks that had used homosexual relationship and hookup apps — then shared it with bishops around the country.
Leaders of the group, dubbed the Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, didn’t a lot need to talk about the secretive mission with the Submit. However the paper did handle to speak to a number of insiders aware of the hassle who (fairly accurately) spotlight the unethical nature of the marketing campaign:
Each disapprove of the mission as a result of they see it as spying and coercive in methods which can be damaging to priest-bishop relations and to the popularity of the Catholic Church and thus its means to evangelize. Additionally they see the mission as taking a simplistic strategy to morality that they name un-Catholic.
Among the people behind this effort are, unsurprisingly, the identical ones that forced a priest to resign in 2021 after acquiring his “anonymized” (learn: not at all anonymous) Grindr information and outing him to the general public. It’s not arduous to see how comparable techniques could possibly be utilized by activists and vigilantes to harass (or worse) these searching for abortion care within the post-Roe period. Or, how our lax regulatory atmosphere might more and more be abused by crackpots extra usually.
For the higher a part of a technology, activists and privateness advocates warned what would occur if we didn’t construct significant guard rails for the gathering and monetization of U.S. client information. Policymakers repeatedly ignored them, making it aggressively clear that getting cash was extra essential than client security and even market well being.
Now, we’ve arrived at a degree the place everybody from stalkers to folks pretending to be law enforcement can purchase delicate client location, looking, and even psychological well being information and weaponize it towards you. That’s earlier than you even get to the repeated failures of main corporations and telecoms to meaningfully safe their very own networks from energetic hacker intrusions.
Even post-Roe, when activists made it clear that our failure to adequately regulate information brokers might pose unique new risks to those looking to obtain abortion care for themselves or their family members, the U.S. policymaker response has been both an enormous yawn, or to try to distract the general public from their broader coverage failures by myopically hyperventilating about TikTok.
Once more, we don’t need to repair the precise downside (our failure to meaningfully regulate information brokers or cross a significant internet-era privateness regulation) as a result of U.S. corporations may make much less cash, and the U.S. authorities must get hold of warrants as a substitute of shopping for information dealer information on a budget.
Filed Beneath: anonymized, browsing data, data, location data, priests, privacy, privacy law, security
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